Social bookmarking in education
Essay No.3 writter: masume amiri Date: 1392/2/1 Social bookmarking is a tool educators can use to store, organize and share bookmarks of websites. The bookmarks or favorites are stored on a Social Bookmarking site rather than on your local machine. As a teacher, this tool can be very beneficial in organizing websites for use with students. Social Bookmarking sites will also allow you to share your bookmarked or favorites sites with colleagues. · List websites for classroom use · Access bookmark/favorites from any computer with an Internet connection · Share sites with colleagues · Create a list of homework help sites that students can access from home or school · Create a list of safe research sites for students · Organize your bookmarks/favorites by topic · Show students how to use Social Bookmarking sites to store their own sites Social bookmarking in education is a new and exciting opportunity for teachers and students to connect and collaborate online There are many potential uses for social bookmarking in education. However, you may be asking yourself just what it is. Social bookmarking is a way to save, store, group, and share Internet bookmarks online. It allows you to have access to your favorite bookmarks on any computer with Internet access, so even if you are away from home, or work, you can still find and use the sites you value most. Social bookmarking sites also give you the option of joining a group of like minded people, following, or being followed by, individuals who collect similar types of bookmarks to your own. Examples of such sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and the focus of this article, Diigo. Diigo lets you do more than just bookmark web pages online. For instance, if you install the Diigo toolbar, or toolbar button, you have the ability to highlight text and pictures in a variety of colors, or add sticky notes to a bookmarked page. With this feature you can annotate web pages with thoughts, ideas or additional information. All these notes are saved for the next time you access the saved bookmark, and anyone else you share the bookmark with, (students or teachers), will also see your annotations. It is a great way to focus attention on a large article. Social bookmarking in education makes life easier for us as educators. All we have to do is save our favorite links on the internet and we can access it with ease at a later time. Often we just use the favorites menu on our computer either at work or home. But what if when we’re at home and need to get to a site we saved at school? This is where social bookmarking comes in! Diigo makes social bookmarking and web annotation capabilities easy and powerful! Diigo is an online community for learning people, where information, knowledge and community come together. The Diigo network creates global communities around information, topics, and knowledge. These communities connect people through the content they collect, while also enabling people to discover and share information that matters to them with others in their network. The social part of social bookmarking in education comes in here: you can share your Diigo links that you’ve saved with other teachers who uses Diigo! You can also use Diigo to see the interesting links that they bookmark – this would be extremely useful for a team of teachers who like to share resources. You can even search Diigo to find the many bookmarks that others have saved – it helps to sort out the good sites, which is hard to do on most search engines. If a lot of people have saved a link, you know it’s at least popular. A teacher could set up an account for each class, tag resources and make the URL available to the class. As the work is web-based it can be modified and updated from any internet connected computer. Likewise students can access the resources from any internet connected computer. *A specific tag (within a group of tags) could be used to direct individual students to specific readings or resources. *A collaborative account could be created, the username and password shared by a class or group of students who could then tag and share resources. *Library staff could maintain a list of tags specifically relevant to their school's curriculum Many of bookmarking services also have RSS feeds, so students who use a news aggregator can see new postings automatically. Using social bookmarking can help offset expensive textbook costs or supplement reading materials (17). While textbook cost is a more prominent issue in higher education, secondary classrooms can supplement their texts with articles and other content found online. Teachers can gather content relevant to their curriculum online and share it freely and easily with their students. They can update readings as often as they like, getting the most current information available. Students have responded positively to the use of social bookmarking in this way because they feel the material is more up-to-date than the information found in a traditional textbook. One of the main uses for Diigo is research. Students can use Diigo at school for online research and access all their information at home. Diigo also allows students to highlight and take notes directly on the webpage. Once they have gathered research, students can collaborate and share their research with other members of their group or class. For a group project, students can share resources with one another with a few clicks, as opposed to having to copy handwritten notes or highlights on paper. Paul and Elder (31) say that close reading requires three things: that the reader interact with the text by making decisions about meaning, that the reader write down the ideas he encounters in the text, and that the reader connect these ideas to ideas and experienced we already understand. Teachers can use Diigo to teach their students how to read critically. Teachers are modeling what close reading looks like on a webpage. Because Diigo allows users to share their highlights and annotations, teachers can break down pieces of reading on Diigo and share their annotations and highlights with their students. As reading shifts more toward the screen than the page, teachers must replace the yellow highlighter with the e-highlighter.